I've been using SB Acoustics paper cone, plastic chassis drivers recently and they're amazing and dirt cheap. I love designing x-overs the "proper" way. It'll take me half a dozen designs before I'm happy.
I love paper cones. The one's you showed first that you developed look almost exactly like the woofers in my Totem Rainmakers (which are hooked up on my PC sitting in front of me), only difference I can see is the conical shape of the dust cap instead of a domed dust cap. Paper sounds great though, I've compared a lot of drivers back in my car audio SQ days, and paper was always the best, just hoped that the car door windows wouldn't leak water on them.
First Danny, just want to say that I am so happy you have your own RUclips channel now and excited to hear more from you. I have been a big DIYer my whole life but am retired now with no real way to build stuff anymore but like to follow what you are doing and be a vicarious DIYer anyway. I used to work in the pro sound business and still have a pair of Altec 604s that were the staple of recording studios for decades. I wish that i could have you design crossovers for them and remission them into service as I'm sure you could make them sound better than ever. They are 15" coaxial horn speakers with 101dB sensitivity and were used to record, mix and master many records over the years. It would really be exciting to breath new life into them.
9:32 Who is here from DIYMA? Raise your hands! Man, WHY did I not HEAR ABOUT GR-R Sooner. Man, this is EXACTLY what DIY is suppose to be like. I keep bring up the OLD GM and how those videos just have that wonderful quality that JUST can not be Duplicated. But here it is! In present day. Mr. Rodgers of Audio. THIS is going to be shared far and wide. Its about time someone took this kind of time to explain why. And I think its time I look into my first kit. And this is going up on DIYMA. If you say those drivers are really where its at? Its going to go in a build soon for my car. I'd like to test them out with some Basic active systems, and see what I can do.
The “Mr. Rogers of Audio”….. I like that description and I agree it’s fitting for Danny. Of course, others may disagree but that’s ok too. Even Fred Rogers had his critics (but didn’t care).
Those drivers that you were pointing out that have paper cones were the smoothest looking paper cones I have seen. Looked like polypropylene cones, very smooth finish! All the drivers on my speakers are original to them. They are ProAc EBTs. Came out in 1986, late 86. Nothing has been done to them. What attracted me to them was their transparency, speed and easy to listen to for hours on end. Any improvements you could do to help them out could not hurt. Their speaker terminals are the pits. Wished I’d bought those hardened copper ones back in 87-88 when they came into the shop. They were well made and built like a tank. Don’t know who made them. Just know they looked and handled well in my hands. The drivers in them now are maybe 4” X 2 and the tweeter is a silk dome 3/4”. I’m guessing. Have no measurement equipment at present. Your call! Let me know what you think. I can’t send them in their original box. I’ll have to fabricate a shipping solution and double box them. Don’t want a disaster. I’ve shipped equipment to the northeast coast. I can get them to you unscathed. Years of shipping high end gear in CONUS and around the world. I don’t expect to snap my fingers to get a turnaround. I figure I will be getting my grin on when I get them back with your improvements. Hope I can keep the original drivers, but I will accept what I get and expect greatness. They are worth greatness to me as they were a gift from my former boss. That makes them special! I await your decision. I’m trusting in you on faith. Your passion for this work is much like my own so please let me know when and how and where! Okay?
I agree with your analysis of the difference between car audio drivers and home audio drivers. How ever, one must understand why there is this difference. Ambient noise. At home it is (mostly) negligible. Not in your car. Hence the increase in amp power, size of drivers/motors etc. I remember in the early 80's at the dawn of car audio, we would install ADS Power plates (sweet sounding, well detailed amps somewhere around 30, 40 w/ch.) in Benzes, Jags etc. NEVER in a ricer, or run of the mill American daily driver. Those cars were too noisy and forced the owners to push the amps close to the limit to get acceptable listening enjoyment, As to where in a Benz, at low levels, all the detail and subtlety was there. Love your channel. I'm thinking about your floor standers with the open baffle design. Been eyeing open baffle for a bit. Anywho, thanks for the vids. Very informative. Cheers.
This was a very helpful video. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed watching your videos immensely!!I also like Steve Deckert and Nelson Pass videos. But I have learned a lot more from your videos. Thank you. 👍👍
Bought b&w towers with 5 inch drivers and they were not full sound and strained, vs 7 inch drivers I had on older towers, which effortlessly filled a room. Does this make sense? Seems larger drivers for bass make a huge diff.
the reason car audio uses wider gaps is for better air flow for cooling purposes- i think. A lot of us car audio nuts or bass heads care far more about how loud the noise-music is than how good it sounds. lol
how you doing. I am new to your channel. I have a huge question and I am sure it will be redundant. Here goes. I have a nice set of speakers I purchased about 4 years ago. Monitor Audio Silver 8. I have in the past been more accustom to a bit higher end, but I bought these for the Price vs performance. I have had much better speakers in the Past. Tannoy's and my personal favorites, I had a set of Totem Forests the originals. with the dynaudio driver. The Silver 8 are okay. I have a Denon H3500. Its been several years I have had them. I still do not like the sound. I had a Anthem MR300 The Denon has more power but the anthem sounded better. Are these a wash or is there something I can do? Thanks and I like the channel. Jason.
I design a crossover with software based on the driver specs and some semi-educated guesses, next I build the speaker, measure it and look what is wrong and correct it, works fine for me most of the time.
I'm really interested to know how a driver is manufactured/engineered to meet a certain resistance level as in the example of the M130 woofer here . All else being equal, what changes between the 8 ohm and 16 ohm version?
Usually that is simply a function of the voice coil that sit's in the flux gap and actually drives the cone. How many turns, it's thickness and material used, usually being copper. Of course that is only DC resistance. An audio waveform is a complex waveform than can be thought of as AC. So it becomes impedance. However impedance changes with respect to frequency and driver parameters, becoming more complicated. Hence the simply beauty of the Impedance Curve plot. Basically speaking at any rate.
TuiCatNZ, marketing hype is always part o the sales end. The reality is that it is about mass and mass movement. There’s nothing wrong with treated paper cones. Plain paper cones are not up to the task. Carbon fiber and Kevlar are just gimmickry and hoodwinking marketing ploys! Danny’s research has proven this.
Tesla Nick, there’s nothing wrong with treated paper cones. The straight up paper cones self distruct when pressed. The treating of the paper gives it a density change. Depending on the specific treatment method. My speakers use treated paper cone woofers. It works for me. All that hype doesn’t amount to beans. A few crossover mods a wire change and new connectors for speaker connection and mine will be as best as they can be. Most any can.
It's always an engineering compromise between stiffness and mass. A flimsy paper cone will introduce distortion by flexing. The input signal delivers motive force at the center of the cone, and it takes time to transfer that motive force out toward the edges. The more flex from center to edge, the more distortion the driver produces. This is also why big 12" and 15+" woofers have gone out of vogue. The bigger they are, the more they will flex and the more distortion. But larger size also has other benefits - like greater efficiency and lower response. So that's even more engineering compromises to consider. If you watch some of these car audio enthusiasts, you will sometimes see the cone flexing out of shape. You can see it due to a strobe effect - like how you can see the blades of a helicopter in flight. That flexing is real (just like the chopper blade is real), and it's pure distortion. But they just want loud, not good. OK, so we stiffen the cone and reduce distortion, right? Not so fast. Remember what Richie said about "stored energy"? More mass means more energy required to move it, and more energy required to stop it from moving. And if that cone keeps moving after the signal ends - that's another type of distortion called spectral decay. In a perfect world, a spectral decay graph would be just one line at the very back of the graph. But since we're moving mass, and mass takes time to stop - we get more lines. Each line is a slice of time - and the frequency response curve of the driver at that time. The more lines, the longer it took for the driver to quit moving at that frequency. So when you see a spectral decay graph that seems to go on forever, there's a lot of stored energy (distortion) that is being released before the driver finally stops. And it's all due to excessive mass. So there's been a mad search for the perfect compromise between mass and stiffness. And I've seen all kinds of materials tried - metal cones, titanium, ruby crystal, kevlar, poly-everything under the sun, spider silk, carbon nanotubes, all kinds of paper treatments, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. What Richie is saying is that the kind of distortion from cone flex sounds better to him, and is easier to handle for beginners than the distortion caused by excessive mass. and believe it or not, even this wall of text is an oversimplification. There's entire books written on this subject. And I mean more than one.
My God, I SO WISH I had all of that fancy measuring equipment and speaker design computer software and stuff, but I can't afford to buy ANY of it... NOR even a computer for that matter! (I only have internet on my phone, which I need for work contacts anyway) I am *majorly* interested in speaker design and improving and (re)building and repairing, and I've been into that as a *hobby* at least, ever since I was a kid, (now in my late 40's), and I also still have a REALLY good "ear" for sound quality and frequency response, clarity, presence, imaging, distortion levels, etc.... However, since I am definitely "paycheck to paycheck" POOR, (money-wise), and I can ONLY afford to deal with drivers and crossover components that I salvage from speakers I find at my local thrift stores or garage sales, etc., for no more than $1/inch of driver diameter, I am forced to build and improve speakers simply by ear only, using extensive, careful listening to them with different types of music that I am very familiar with how it SHOULD sound, because I've heard those albums on many different truly high-end systems in showrooms, but that I could never even come close to being able to actually afford!... I could and definitely WOULD really appreciate having all of the proper test equipment to properly measure, evaluate, and "tweak" speakers and individual drivers, but because of my minimum wage part time job, (AND my Aspergers, which ultimately prevents me from ever getting a better paying job OR any "extra" money), I'll probably never be able to get or have any of that fancy stuff in my life! :( But since I still DO have *really* good hearing, and an ear for sound quality, because I always took care of my hearing throughout my life, I can actually hear all of the minute details that most people can't, so I at least use my basic book knowledge and experience about what makes speakers sound better that I've learned over the decades, and I can make almost any speaker I get my hands and ears on sound better than it was originally, just using my knowledge and careful listening and back and forth experimenting. I have pretty good luck doing it that way, due to MANY YEARS of practice, but if I actually was able to obtain any/all of the proper test and evaluation equipment and computer design programs, it would definitely make it a LOT easier and faster of a process for me!!... A few brands of speakers that I have found lots of in the second hand thrift market for that magic price point of $1/inch of mid/woofer driver diameter, AND that consistently sound VERY good, are JVC, Polk Audio, and Infinity, among a few other lesser known brands, but especially speakers made by those 3 companies usually have VERY good sounding and VERY good build quality drivers in them, which can either be used and improved in their original speaker design and model, or else taken out and re-used in another speaker design or model to make them sound usually better... I just wish I had all of that sophisticated measuring equipment and such so that my speaker improvement, designing, and building hobby wasn't always such a random "crapshoot" experiment, and was a lot faster, that way I could actually churn out some speaker designs and models to maybe sell... at least to friends! Lol! At least I have FUN working on and improving speakers, even though I don't have any measuring equipment to properly evaluate their frequency response, etc... Luckily though, I can usually tell by very carefully *listening* to a speaker or individual driver what its approximate useable frequency response is, and where all of its major resonances are across the spectrum, so I just have to go off of that in my head to make it work, or work better... But I KNOW, that given my basic and even rather extensive knowledge about speakers, that I could do SO MUCH BETTER than I even already do by ear, if I actually had or could afford to buy all of the "necessary" test and evaluation equipment and computer programs for speaker building!... I believe I would ALSO be a MAJOR ASSET to any really good speaker design and manufacturing *company* as a tech or design guy!... But IDK if I REALLY want to work for someone else doing what I love as a personal *hobby* ; I would rather instead love to somehow build my very own company and speaker building business around my knowledge and understanding, and work at "home" and for myself!... Maybe someday!
@@dreamdiction Yeah, I totally agree! But being able to ALSO accurately measure speaker parameters in addition to listening to them would make speaker building a lot easier and more thorough! It would just be in *addition to* tuning the "final" results by very careful listening and sound quality, NOT in place of it entirely! Lol!... Did you even read through my entire comment? (Something tells me you didn't!) Because tuning a speaker mith careful music listening by ear is pretty much exactly what I have to do, (and enjoy doing), since I have no real test equipment other than a multimeter, so any test equipment I get would only help me out to be more accurate in my guesstimates! (I mean my ear is pretty darn good, but still...)
Driver selection is one of the most frustrating aspects of speaker design for me. I go to all the usual places and it's junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, very nice, but not the parameters I'm looking for, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk... And price seems to bear almost no relevance on parameters. A $400 driver may have great quality parts, but the parameters are as junky as any $40 driver. Driver selection is HARD. I can go months without finding a suitable match. I can see where people just go, "screw it, imma just gonna throw a couple drivers in a box and call it a day" Edit: by parameters, I'm not talking about simulations. I'm talking the basics - frequency response, sensitivity, RMS and peak power handling, that kind of basic stuff.
OMG, i just want good quality sound that does not fatigue. So complicated. I guess ill balance everything out.. Room, Sound treatments(Curtains made a huge dif), Enclosures, Drivers, Crossovers and amps.
I've been using SB Acoustics paper cone, plastic chassis drivers recently and they're amazing and dirt cheap. I love designing x-overs the "proper" way. It'll take me half a dozen designs before I'm happy.
I love paper cones. The one's you showed first that you developed look almost exactly like the woofers in my Totem Rainmakers (which are hooked up on my PC sitting in front of me), only difference I can see is the conical shape of the dust cap instead of a domed dust cap. Paper sounds great though, I've compared a lot of drivers back in my car audio SQ days, and paper was always the best, just hoped that the car door windows wouldn't leak water on them.
This is good advice to all DIY beginners. I am building my own speakers since years and made a lot of mistakes. Keep on with this edu videos !
First Danny, just want to say that I am so happy you have your own RUclips channel now and excited to hear more from you. I have been a big DIYer my whole life but am retired now with no real way to build stuff anymore but like to follow what you are doing and be a vicarious DIYer anyway. I used to work in the pro sound business and still have a pair of Altec 604s that were the staple of recording studios for decades. I wish that i could have you design crossovers for them and remission them into service as I'm sure you could make them sound better than ever. They are 15" coaxial horn speakers with 101dB sensitivity and were used to record, mix and master many records over the years. It would really be exciting to breath new life into them.
9:32 Who is here from DIYMA? Raise your hands! Man, WHY did I not HEAR ABOUT GR-R Sooner. Man, this is EXACTLY what DIY is suppose to be like. I keep bring up the OLD GM and how those videos just have that wonderful quality that JUST can not be Duplicated.
But here it is! In present day. Mr. Rodgers of Audio. THIS is going to be shared far and wide. Its about time someone took this kind of time to explain why. And I think its time I look into my first kit.
And this is going up on DIYMA. If you say those drivers are really where its at? Its going to go in a build soon for my car. I'd like to test them out with some Basic active systems, and see what I can do.
Are these really better than the Dayton reference drivers kit speakers ?
Never saw a diyma or CAJ thread about you giving these a try. Ever get around to it??
The “Mr. Rogers of Audio”….. I like that description and I agree it’s fitting for Danny. Of course, others may disagree but that’s ok too. Even Fred Rogers had his critics (but didn’t care).
Those drivers that you were pointing out that have paper cones were the smoothest looking paper cones I have seen. Looked like polypropylene cones, very smooth finish! All the drivers on my speakers are original to them. They are ProAc EBTs. Came out in 1986, late 86. Nothing has been done to them. What attracted me to them was their transparency, speed and easy to listen to for hours on end. Any improvements you could do to help them out could not hurt. Their speaker terminals are the pits. Wished I’d bought those hardened copper ones back in 87-88 when they came into the shop. They were well made and built like a tank. Don’t know who made them. Just know they looked and handled well in my hands. The drivers in them now are maybe 4” X 2 and the tweeter is a silk dome 3/4”. I’m guessing. Have no measurement equipment at present. Your call! Let me know what you think. I can’t send them in their original box. I’ll have to fabricate a shipping solution and double box them. Don’t want a disaster. I’ve shipped equipment to the northeast coast. I can get them to you unscathed. Years of shipping high end gear in CONUS and around the world. I don’t expect to snap my fingers to get a turnaround. I figure I will be getting my grin on when I get them back with your improvements. Hope I can keep the original drivers, but I will accept what I get and expect greatness. They are worth greatness to me as they were a gift from my former boss. That makes them special! I await your decision. I’m trusting in you on faith. Your passion for this work is much like my own so please let me know when and how and where! Okay?
ProAc use Volt loudspeakers. voltloudspeakers.co.uk/loudspeakers/bm165-1-6-5/
Good video. The mention of impedance curves was greatly appreciated!
Driver selection is most critical when everyone has been drinking.
I sure do love this page, I learn so much, no vetting required... the topics and delivery make so much sense... Thank you!!!!
Very helpful information and a very genuine message. Thank you!
I agree with your analysis of the difference between car audio drivers and home audio drivers.
How ever, one must understand why there is this difference. Ambient noise. At home it is (mostly) negligible. Not in your car.
Hence the increase in amp power, size of drivers/motors etc. I remember in the early 80's at the dawn of car audio, we would install ADS Power plates (sweet sounding, well detailed amps somewhere around 30, 40 w/ch.) in Benzes, Jags etc. NEVER in a ricer, or run of the mill American daily driver. Those cars were too noisy and forced the owners to push the amps close to the limit to get acceptable listening enjoyment, As to where in a Benz, at low levels, all the detail and subtlety was there.
Love your channel. I'm thinking about your floor standers with the open baffle design. Been eyeing open baffle for a bit. Anywho, thanks for the vids.
Very informative. Cheers.
his point was that you can get all that by just making the voice coil gap normal to achieve the same field strength with a smaller driver.
This was a very helpful video. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed watching your videos immensely!!I also like Steve Deckert and Nelson Pass videos. But I have learned a lot more from your videos. Thank you. 👍👍
Could you do a video about phase shift when changing inductors or capacitors?
Bought b&w towers with 5 inch drivers and they were not full sound and strained, vs 7 inch drivers I had on older towers, which effortlessly filled a room. Does this make sense? Seems larger drivers for bass make a huge diff.
Thank u for all this information, I’m not building speakers but the information was very interesting 🤔
Awesome videos by you Sir and I love this one thing that you are passion driven. Thank you so much!!
Muchas gracias por todos tus consejos y la experiencia que transmites.
Aprendo mucho con tus videos.
Saludos
the reason car audio uses wider gaps is for better air flow for cooling purposes- i think. A lot of us car audio nuts or bass heads care far more about how loud the noise-music is than how good it sounds. lol
Inspiring- In your opinion would i be wise to try to use 15 inch LF units? ( I am prejudiced to believe 12 inch is smallest unit for bass.... )
does full range speaker also need crossover? or is it better to have one made after speaker is tested?
danny you are god of sound
Thank you very much for all the info... you're passionate about sound.
Those wavecore drivers are nice. I had their 7" with a Neo 2.0 in a sealed enclosure, was a very VERY nice speaker.
how you doing. I am new to your channel. I have a huge question and I am sure it will be redundant. Here goes. I have a nice set of speakers I purchased about 4 years ago. Monitor Audio Silver 8. I have in the past been more accustom to a bit higher end, but I bought these for the Price vs performance. I have had much better speakers in the Past. Tannoy's and my personal favorites, I had a set of Totem Forests the originals. with the dynaudio
driver. The Silver 8 are okay. I have a Denon H3500. Its been several years I have had them. I still do not like the sound. I had a Anthem MR300 The Denon has more power but the anthem sounded better. Are these a wash or is there something I can do?
Thanks and I like the channel. Jason.
SB Satori papyrus seem pretty good. I'm using these alot. Also the old scan rev 5.5"
I design a crossover with software based on the driver specs and some semi-educated guesses, next I build the speaker, measure it and look what is wrong and correct it, works fine for me most of the time.
I'm really interested to know how a driver is manufactured/engineered to meet a certain resistance level as in the example of the M130 woofer here . All else being equal, what changes between the 8 ohm and 16 ohm version?
Usually that is simply a function of the voice coil that sit's in the flux gap and actually drives the cone. How many turns, it's thickness and material used, usually being copper.
Of course that is only DC resistance. An audio waveform is a complex waveform than can be thought of as AC. So it becomes impedance. However impedance changes with respect to frequency and driver parameters, becoming more complicated. Hence the simply beauty of the Impedance Curve plot.
Basically speaking at any rate.
Buy a pre-engineered kit, you'll be way ahead. That's exactly what I want.
I wonder how my cheap EMP Tech Bookshelf from RBH compares to the DIY stuff.
So many speakers out there so little upgrade kits available.
Thank you for great video.
Is that a Carver amp under the computer table? Looks like the one my dad has at home.
How much would the measuring equipment cost?
Have you ever considered that the baskets vibration add to ringing?
A lot of people use blu tack or bitumin pads to damp driver baskets, esp on cheaper stamped steel types.
That is why the frames on all of our drivers are a high strength polymer, and are resonance free.
Love this man. Total badass.
Crazy that simple paper can still outperform more high tech products like carbon fiber and kevlar. Is it all marketing??
TuiCatNZ, marketing hype is always part o the sales end. The reality is that it is about mass and mass movement. There’s nothing wrong with treated paper cones. Plain paper cones are not up to the task. Carbon fiber and Kevlar are just gimmickry and hoodwinking marketing ploys! Danny’s research has proven this.
My SB Acoustics paper composite cones are amazing, plus they're dirt cheap.
Tesla Nick, there’s nothing wrong with treated paper cones. The straight up paper cones self distruct when pressed. The treating of the paper gives it a density change. Depending on the specific treatment method. My speakers use treated paper cone woofers. It works for me. All that hype doesn’t amount to beans. A few crossover mods a wire change and new connectors for speaker connection and mine will be as best as they can be. Most any can.
It's always an engineering compromise between stiffness and mass. A flimsy paper cone will introduce distortion by flexing. The input signal delivers motive force at the center of the cone, and it takes time to transfer that motive force out toward the edges. The more flex from center to edge, the more distortion the driver produces.
This is also why big 12" and 15+" woofers have gone out of vogue. The bigger they are, the more they will flex and the more distortion. But larger size also has other benefits - like greater efficiency and lower response. So that's even more engineering compromises to consider.
If you watch some of these car audio enthusiasts, you will sometimes see the cone flexing out of shape. You can see it due to a strobe effect - like how you can see the blades of a helicopter in flight. That flexing is real (just like the chopper blade is real), and it's pure distortion. But they just want loud, not good.
OK, so we stiffen the cone and reduce distortion, right? Not so fast. Remember what Richie said about "stored energy"? More mass means more energy required to move it, and more energy required to stop it from moving. And if that cone keeps moving after the signal ends - that's another type of distortion called spectral decay. In a perfect world, a spectral decay graph would be just one line at the very back of the graph. But since we're moving mass, and mass takes time to stop - we get more lines. Each line is a slice of time - and the frequency response curve of the driver at that time. The more lines, the longer it took for the driver to quit moving at that frequency. So when you see a spectral decay graph that seems to go on forever, there's a lot of stored energy (distortion) that is being released before the driver finally stops. And it's all due to excessive mass.
So there's been a mad search for the perfect compromise between mass and stiffness. And I've seen all kinds of materials tried - metal cones, titanium, ruby crystal, kevlar, poly-everything under the sun, spider silk, carbon nanotubes, all kinds of paper treatments, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. What Richie is saying is that the kind of distortion from cone flex sounds better to him, and is easier to handle for beginners than the distortion caused by excessive mass.
and believe it or not, even this wall of text is an oversimplification. There's entire books written on this subject. And I mean more than one.
The yellow "kevlar" cones where very popular for a short time, now they are about extinct. What was wrong with them?
Suspect higher cost..
Bullet proof speakers were a marketing gimic.
Probably because people don't want bright yellow speakers next to the tv? I know I wouldn't want that. Looks cheap.
@@clementng7718 too heavy imo
What do you think of Vandersteen speakers?
I'm surprised nobody uses paper micarta cones yet
My God, I SO WISH I had all of that fancy measuring equipment and speaker design computer software and stuff, but I can't afford to buy ANY of it... NOR even a computer for that matter! (I only have internet on my phone, which I need for work contacts anyway)
I am *majorly* interested in speaker design and improving and (re)building and repairing, and I've been into that as a *hobby* at least, ever since I was a kid, (now in my late 40's), and I also still have a REALLY good "ear" for sound quality and frequency response, clarity, presence, imaging, distortion levels, etc.... However, since I am definitely "paycheck to paycheck" POOR, (money-wise), and I can ONLY afford to deal with drivers and crossover components that I salvage from speakers I find at my local thrift stores or garage sales, etc., for no more than $1/inch of driver diameter, I am forced to build and improve speakers simply by ear only, using extensive, careful listening to them with different types of music that I am very familiar with how it SHOULD sound, because I've heard those albums on many different truly high-end systems in showrooms, but that I could never even come close to being able to actually afford!...
I could and definitely WOULD really appreciate having all of the proper test equipment to properly measure, evaluate, and "tweak" speakers and individual drivers, but because of my minimum wage part time job, (AND my Aspergers, which ultimately prevents me from ever getting a better paying job OR any "extra" money), I'll probably never be able to get or have any of that fancy stuff in my life! :(
But since I still DO have *really* good hearing, and an ear for sound quality, because I always took care of my hearing throughout my life, I can actually hear all of the minute details that most people can't, so I at least use my basic book knowledge and experience about what makes speakers sound better that I've learned over the decades, and I can make almost any speaker I get my hands and ears on sound better than it was originally, just using my knowledge and careful listening and back and forth experimenting. I have pretty good luck doing it that way, due to MANY YEARS of practice, but if I actually was able to obtain any/all of the proper test and evaluation equipment and computer design programs, it would definitely make it a LOT easier and faster of a process for me!!...
A few brands of speakers that I have found lots of in the second hand thrift market for that magic price point of $1/inch of mid/woofer driver diameter, AND that consistently sound VERY good, are JVC, Polk Audio, and Infinity, among a few other lesser known brands, but especially speakers made by those 3 companies usually have VERY good sounding and VERY good build quality drivers in them, which can either be used and improved in their original speaker design and model, or else taken out and re-used in another speaker design or model to make them sound usually better...
I just wish I had all of that sophisticated measuring equipment and such so that my speaker improvement, designing, and building hobby wasn't always such a random "crapshoot" experiment, and was a lot faster, that way I could actually churn out some speaker designs and models to maybe sell... at least to friends! Lol!
At least I have FUN working on and improving speakers, even though I don't have any measuring equipment to properly evaluate their frequency response, etc... Luckily though, I can usually tell by very carefully *listening* to a speaker or individual driver what its approximate useable frequency response is, and where all of its major resonances are across the spectrum, so I just have to go off of that in my head to make it work, or work better... But I KNOW, that given my basic and even rather extensive knowledge about speakers, that I could do SO MUCH BETTER than I even already do by ear, if I actually had or could afford to buy all of the "necessary" test and evaluation equipment and computer programs for speaker building!...
I believe I would ALSO be a MAJOR ASSET to any really good speaker design and manufacturing *company* as a tech or design guy!... But IDK if I REALLY want to work for someone else doing what I love as a personal *hobby* ; I would rather instead love to somehow build my very own company and speaker building business around my knowledge and understanding, and work at "home" and for myself!... Maybe someday!
You must judge a speaker by the SOUND, not by the measurements.
@@dreamdiction Yeah, I totally agree! But being able to ALSO accurately measure speaker parameters in addition to listening to them would make speaker building a lot easier and more thorough! It would just be in *addition to* tuning the "final" results by very careful listening and sound quality, NOT in place of it entirely! Lol!... Did you even read through my entire comment? (Something tells me you didn't!) Because tuning a speaker mith careful music listening by ear is pretty much exactly what I have to do, (and enjoy doing), since I have no real test equipment other than a multimeter, so any test equipment I get would only help me out to be more accurate in my guesstimates! (I mean my ear is pretty darn good, but still...)
Driver selection is one of the most frustrating aspects of speaker design for me. I go to all the usual places and it's junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, very nice, but not the parameters I'm looking for, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk...
And price seems to bear almost no relevance on parameters. A $400 driver may have great quality parts, but the parameters are as junky as any $40 driver. Driver selection is HARD. I can go months without finding a suitable match.
I can see where people just go, "screw it, imma just gonna throw a couple drivers in a box and call it a day"
Edit: by parameters, I'm not talking about simulations. I'm talking the basics - frequency response, sensitivity, RMS and peak power handling, that kind of basic stuff.
OMG, i just want good quality sound that does not fatigue. So complicated. I guess ill balance everything out.. Room, Sound treatments(Curtains made a huge dif), Enclosures, Drivers, Crossovers and amps.
Try Sony's SS-CS5 or tower. Cheap, well made and 2 tweeters for non fatigue treble that is smooth and effortless. Danny did a review and liked them :)
You're much too accommodating.